Work has stopped for the last few months on the Colorado Springs Health Partners' project off Centennial Boulevard south of Fillmore Street - but not for good.
The break has been necessary to finalize construction designs on the future facility for medical specialists, and that process is still not quite complete, explained Health
Partners' Acting CEO Jeff Milburn this week. “Money isn't the issue,” he emphasized. “We had a good year last year and the year before. We're basically trying to
decide on the scope of the building.”
Overall, he predicted, the facility will be open in about two years.
After extensive grading to create broad, flat areas on the once-hilly site, the most recent work has involved extending Centennial Boulevard the length of the property,
past the 44-acre site, and laying in some underground utilities.
As Milburn quipped, “we've scraped the ground; we haven't broken it.”
When built, the facility will be centralized in one place for about 90 medical and surgical specialists with Colorado Springs Health Partners. No primary-care doctors
are slated to be there; the 60-year-old consortium of physicians already has such services in Rockrimmon and on West Colorado Avenue, Milburn said.
The construction discussions so far have dealt chiefly with how the new building ought to be laid out to accommodate the individual needs of the specialists. Even the
size is still being determined. Milburn said it could be anywhere between 100,000 and 135,000 square feet. The current status is that the doctors have agreed to a
basic plan and authorized Health Partners administrators to have architects come up with precise drawings for their further review.
With parking and landscaping, the building will take up about a third of a 44-acre area that has been envisioned as a “medical campus.”
Most of the Colorado Springs Health Partners specialists who will relocate to the new location are currently in leased space downtown. The lease runs to 2010, so
the timing should be about right, Milburn said.